Memset Acquires URL Shortening Service, Is.gd

Web Hosting Services – United Kingdom – UK cloud provider, Memset announced the acquisition of URL shortening service, Is.gd. The purchase comes days after both Amazon and Twitter announced they are rolling out their own URL shortening services putting the longevity of small players in jeopardy.

But Memset has secured the future of Is.gd and plans to maintain it as a non-advertising-supported, free Internet service indefinitely, giving users assurance that their Is.gd URLs will be around forever.

Speaking on Twitter’s plans to launch their own URL shortening service and not give users a choice of an outside service, Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: “I think it would be a shame for Twitter to block other URL shorteners, but URL shortening has been around for years, and there are also plenty of other social networking and micro-blogging sites out there for which URL shortening is valuable, so I am unconcerned about the impact of Twitter’s ultimate decision.”

Richard West, Is.gd’s founder is staying on board to develop the service further and there will be some major improvements to the site over the next few months. The most compelling of these is that users will be able to create custom shortened URLs, for free!

Craig-Wood explained the rational behind the acquisition: “I love Is.gd and use it a lot, and have often worried about a service like that failing or being bought and monetised. As a cloud provider, we have huge amounts of compute resource and bandwidth, so it was a good match for us. The costs are relatively small, and it also makes a great showcase for our network and hardware performance.”

Although deemed as a small player, Is.gd has been growing rapidly, with 25,555,164 links being shortened in March 2010 compared to 1,120,416 in March 2009.